You can grab the power of Flickr, Youtube, Twitter and thousands of other powerful online applications, presenting their data from within your apps. We’ll show you how with this simple, easy to follow tutorial app.

Our tutorial shows you how to use an image repository’s API’s to access their image gallery.

We also show you how to use the OkHttp library to do network uploads, downloads and queries.

Finally, we also show you how to use the Picasso library to download, cache and display images in a RecyclerView widget.

What a partnership! Picasso and RecyclerView

If you display images in lists or grids then you should consider using Picasso and RecyclerView.

Picasso is a powerful image downloading and caching library package which you include in your app build. It simplifies working with images, reducing the code that you need to use to one line of code.

Picasso is fast and easy to use and it’s FREE!

The RecyclerView widget is essentially a container that you can use to display large sets of data. It’s very efficient as it only displays a few items at a time. Views that are no longer needed are recycled and reused.

Not having to keep on inflating views saves CPU resources and valuable memory is saved by not having to keep views alive in the background.

Combine Picasso and RecyclerView and your app will move at the speed of light!

RecyclerView and CardView widgets for all

Android’s latest release, Lollipop (Android 5.0 API Level 21) includes the new RecyclerView and CardView widgets. They’re also made available for use on devices running API Level 7 and above through the Support Libraries.

The RecyclerView provides a more advanced and flexible way of displaying lists than the old ListView.

The CardView widget enables you to display views inside a card. You can design the card so that its look is consistent across your app.